Napster Documentarian’s Next Project: The Untold Story of Bitcoin

The way director Alex Winter sees it, Napster, WikiLeaks and Bitcoin are just threads in the same yarn – a story of a deep divide growing between the internet that everyone can see and a more mysterious web where peer-to-peer pioneers rule. He should know – he’s a time-traveler.

OK, not really. He just played one in a movie. He was Bill S. Preston in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But in recent years he’s become a documentary filmmaker adept at finding the connective tissue between what happens in the back-channels of the internet and how it affects everyone IRL, even those that don’t understand how it works. His last doc was Downloaded – a thoughtful look back at the growth and impact of Napster – and his latest will go even deeper, looking at Bitcoins, the uber-popular digital currency that he first became fascinated with while still working on his file-sharing film.

“With Downloaded I was less interested in the implications of music or file-sharing… and more concerned with what peer-to-peer architecture meant in terms of creating global community, which could be used for good or ill,” Winter told WIRED. “What’s going on with [Bitcoin] is just the evolution of peer-to-peer architecture – this is just an outgrowth of the story I started to tell with Napster.”

The director’s latest effort is also striking while the iron’s hot. Bitcoin has had a lot of tongues wagging of late. Last month, the FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, whom they allege ran the online black market Silk Road that used Bitcoins for transactions involving anything from LSD to heroin.

Bitcoin sprang up in 2009 after a paper by someone (or perhaps a group of people) writing as Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the concept of a peer-to-peer digital currency. Now, it seems to be in the news almost every day, whether it’s a story about Bitcoin miners, new ATMs, or theft-by-hacking. However, Winter said he wants his doc to go even deeper than the headline-grabbing moments and get at Bitcoin’s wider implications. “This isn’t a Silk Road movie,” he said. “I’ll make that really clear.”

Winter has already been working on the documentary – titled Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road – for a few years already using funds from private investors and launched a Kickstarter today to raise $75,000 to complete his reporting and finish the doc.

Although he won’t reveal names, Winter said he’s “connected to everybody of significance” in the Bitcoin world. He’s also looking to speak with Ulbricht and hopes to track down the person – or people – behind Satoshi Nakamoto. But mostly, he wants his film to relay that we’re now living in a time of “technological Prohibition” where the gap between those who understand the backchannels of the internet – the places the birthed WikiLeaks and Bitcoin – and the people who don’t is growing at lightning speed.

“It’s like something out of a William Gibson novel,” Winter said. “We really do now live in a world where there is a very stark divide between the people who are in these gigantic technology-based communities that are totally outside the law and the rest of the world, which is either trying to destroy or dismantle these architectures or doesn’t understand them or is scared of them.”